Culture

Ten years ago, you may have been regarded with awe when you successfully downloaded the new Green Day album and burned multiple copies so that your friends could listen to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” on their discmans. No? Just me?

These days, piracy is a pretty casual pastime in Godzone. Fuck those oppressive anti-piracy laws – has anything actually come of those? In the mean time we’ll keep testing the limits, because fuck paying $18 on iTunes for Yeezus.

Overseas, piracy is waning due to the proliferation of services that allow legal access to material for a price that people are willing to pay. Spotify, Steam, and Netflix are re-shaping the global face of media consumption.

Companies have tried several models to allow customers legal access to music. Apple had a good stab at it in 2011 when they offered amnesty to pirates via iTunes Match, a subscription service that scans your music library (including all your pirated material) and gives you the high-quality iTunes version of each file for $39.99 per year. Apple also got rid of DRM restrictions, making the deal all the more attractive.

Additionally, iCloud is now so embedded into the Apple ecosystem that it makes sense for people with lots of Apple products to take advantage of the service if they’re willing to pay for it. Coming in at about $3 per month, it’s not a bad deal.

The service is imperfect, though – many users have problems with iCloud not matching songs that should match up with iTunes songs. According to MacWorld.com, this is even happening with songs that have been legally purchased. iCloud also limits you to 25,000 tracks – that’s a lot of music, but there is a ceiling. And got an Android phone or tablet? Forget about iCloud then. This one only works for people who are completely devoted to Apple. Freaks.

With iTunes (and iTunes Match), you own your music. It’s not physical, but those mp3 files are yours. But with services like Spotify and Rdio offering unlimited streaming, is there much point in owning the music?

Spotify’s free service is … serviceable, but littered with ads. It also lacks the option to download playlists to your phone. At $12.99 per month, Spotify Premium is more expensive than iMatch, but offers benefits of its own. You can download playlists to your phone and play them offline, though you are limited to 3,333 songs. Rdio, at $13.90 per month, is slightly more expensive, but doesn’t limit the number of songs you can store offline.

Spotify’s value lies in its playlists. Let’s face it – keeping up with new music is time-consuming, so curation can be a boon for anyone without a music-obsessed friend. Sites like Spotibot.com make use of Spotify’s API to suggest playlists based on your taste. Type in the name of an artist or band you like and it will spit out a mixtape of similar artists. With Rdio, you can choose to follow friends, artists, music magazines and blogs – anything that aids your music discovery.

Spotify and Rdio offer access to fewer artists than iTunes, but this may change. Apple’s legal teams have been negotiating with record labels for longer than streaming service providers, but evidence suggests that streaming services are what the public want – online music sales are down while streaming service subscriptions are up.

The bottom line for many New Zealanders, however, is bandwidth. Many countries don’t have to deal with pesky things like data caps, and so can stream to their hearts’ content. With last year’s upgrade to the Southern Cross Cable, most telcos have raised their data caps, but making that 100GB last a whole month in a flat of five is still a challenge. Streaming services can eat up a lot of bandwidth in a short time and, while that remains the case, good old-fashioned piracy will flourish in New Zealand.